Regarding climate change, there are four categories of people: antagonistic, oblivious, apathetic, and activist. Good intentions fuel this last group. They’re informed, conscientious, taking action, and second only to Big Oil in pushing us toward the apocalypse. You may be one of them.
How can this be? How do well-intentioned people cause the harm they seek to prevent? The answer lies in the difference between perception and reality.
Environmental Decisions Scramble Our Psyche
People with integrity expect their past good deeds will be considered good in the future. We act under this presumption. Our self-esteem and identity depend on the continuity of goodness. When this continuity breaks down and past good deeds harm the present, integrity fractures and undermines our sense of self. A lot is at stake personally.
Considering the future consequences of our present actions cannot prevent the goodness dilemma because the future is difficult to predict and messy. Conflicts arise that require trade-offs. Today’s environmental problems encompass a variety of catastrophes, including biodiversity loss, climate change, habitat destruction, and pollution. No existing solution solves all of these problems. Even more problematic, sometimes the best solution for one problem makes another problem worse. For example, installing solar farms in natural areas for renewable energy generation destroys habitat. Our environmental choice is between a rock and a hard place. Choosing one value harms another, but we can no longer afford the trade-offs because each of the world’s environmental problems have reached criticality as evidenced by the current mass extinction, human exposure to pervasive microplastic contamination, and catastrophic damage from extreme weather events. New alternatives with less harmful trade-offs become necessary; however, we become path dependent and stick with our prior choice.
Getting stuck in a decision-making rut occurs for multiple reasons. Reality changes; but we may not understand how or when, and the people that do understand may not be able to shout above the din of modern life. When we do hear them, we may not (and sometimes should not) trust them because of the replication crisis in science, in which some experimental results haven’t been reproducible. This messy, uncertain world paired with our identity as people who “do the right thing” allows us to convince ourselves that the good in past acts outweighs the new harm those actions cause.
The Problem is Change
This goodness dependency blinds us to the shifting reality of climate change where the last decade’s antidote is the next decade’s poison. I’m talking about trees. Those beautiful, huggable, carbon-sucking, save-us-all, kumbaya wonders of nature. Trees. They provide homes for wildlife, clean our water and air, and supply shelter. Every one of them is The Giving Tree.
We love them so much. The United States will plant a billion over the next decade. The European Union pledged to plant three billion by 2030. The World Economic Forum’s initiative strives to “conserve, restore, and grow” one trillion trees by 2030. That’s a significant dependency. Time for an intervention.
The shifting reality of climate change is transforming trees from a solution to a problem. The problem extends beyond wildfires, blights, rots, and the teeming hordes of tree-killing insects bent on annihilation. Healthy living forests are emitting greenhouse gasses. Today. Not a hundred years from now. Today. Researchers from Germany and Canada used artificial intelligence to determine that a forest on Vancouver Island, Canada, emitted more carbon than it took in between 2002 and 2006. They arrived at this result by analyzing carbon dioxide changes in the air. In a global study using measurements from over one thousand sites representing all major biomes and plant types, researchers from the United States and New Zealand analyzed whether rising temperatures will flip ecosystems from carbon sinks to sources. The sink to source switch happens when plants exhale more carbon dioxide through respiration than they inhale through photosynthesis. When temperatures rise, plant respiration increases while photosynthesis declines sharply. Scientists forecast terrestrial biomes will lose almost half their carbon sequestration capacity by 2040.
The factors flipping trees from carbon sinks to sources are the same as for other plants: temperature and, to a lesser extent, moisture. As temperatures rise, trees’ respiration of carbon dioxide into the air overwhelms their intake through photosynthesis—the tree equivalent of hyperventilation. We miss this dynamic when we measure a tree’s carbon storage solely by height and diameter growth. The change in tree size is irrelevant if the tree emits more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than it absorbs. Height and girth don’t matter; the atmosphere does because the atmosphere traps the heat causing climate change. Carbon dioxide respiration isn’t the only issue. University of Delaware scientists discovered the trunks of some tree species in upland temperate forests emit methane. Their study measured oak, beech, maple, birch, tupelo, and poplar trees. Other types of trees may also emit methane. This is problematic because methane is twenty-five times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere. Normal, healthy trees are starting to spew greenhouse gasses. This is huge. Humanity depends upon trees to offset fossil fuel emissions and the negative climate impacts from snowpak loss and thawing permafrost (to name a few climate feedback loops).
We Need Solutions for the Present and Future
So should we cut down the forests to save ourselves? Was the Lorax wrong? No. Forests are currently the lowest cost carbon dioxide removal option and offer other benefits like biodiversity conservation and water purification. Trees have their limits, though, and we're pushing them past critical thresholds.
Counterintuitively, we should stop harvesting trees in some areas because we may be living with the last forests to grow there. In 2021, climate change caused an extreme heatwave in the Pacific Northwest, pushing temperatures up to 40–50 ºC. This extreme weather event is now forecast to occur every 5–10 years. Hot, dry conditions disproportionately harm young trees. In some locations in the future (particularly South- and West-facing slopes), seedlings may grow only until the next heatwave kills them, preventing forest regeneration in those areas.
There is hope. But we need to act with a view of the future. Forest research and management should focus on slowing the flip from sink to source. For example, fertilization increases tree growth, i.e. packs more carbon in tree leaves, trunks, and branches. Fertilizer, however, can be a source of greenhouse gasses, is difficult to scale, and doesn’t work everywhere. Another approach will preserve forest canopy integrity–that is keep continuous coverage of large trees through the forest–to preserve the forest’s self-cooling capabilities. A full canopy will cool the understory and retain moisture better than a fragmented forest with breaks in the canopy.
These techniques will slow, but not stop the transition of forests from carbon sinks to sources. The inevitability of this change is foreshadowed by NASA’s graph of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which shows a straight line rise in carbon dioxide with no downturn in sight. See Fig. 1. We’ve waited too long. Done too little. Cutting emissions paired with large-scale tree planting may have worked fifty years ago but not today.
Fig. 1: CO2 Concentration in the Atmosphere
Today, we need tools capable of removing carbon dioxide from the environment regardless of future conditions. These tools can be used to bring atmospheric carbon dioxide down, and consequently lower global temperatures, to levels where nature-based solutions, like afforestation, can work. Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies are being developed for point-source capture, direct air capture, and direct ocean capture; but challenges remain in technological risk, scale, and cost.
Every technology experiences setbacks on the path to deployment; and some approaches will fail, but the biggest problem is scale. Up to ten gigatons of carbon dioxide must be removed from the environment every year to reach net-zero emissions. A gigaton is a billion tons. For perspective, the average weight of an adult human is 62 kg. Humanity must remove the equivalent of 2,200 times the weight of the entire adult human population on Earth every year. That’s a lot of carbon dioxide.
Then there’s cost. Many CDR solutions only sequester carbon, offering no other value or purpose. Thus, these types of CDR technologies will likely cost more than nature-based solutions, such as high quality forest carbon projects. Since forests won’t serve this role much longer, we need the more expensive CDR technologies to restore the environment to the point where less expensive natural solutions can resume sequestration.
There are better ways. Alternative CDR approaches exist that have the potential to provide benefits beyond carbon sequestration. These alternative approaches are carbon negative, adapt to the changing environment, and directly or indirectly produce useful products at market scale. The best of these alternative CDR technologies produce solutions with additional benefits, such as biodiversity conservation, pollution abatement, or sustainable development. With these attributes, CDR technologies are comparable to nature-based solutions and represent a new approach to sustaining both humanity and ecosystems.
Ecosphero is developing new CDR technologies that sequester carbon, conserve biodiversity, reduce pollution, and move humanity toward a sustainable future. We embrace the messy, uncertain future and commit to continually adapting to reality. Our work is difficult but worth it. If you’d like to help, purchase a subscription to our climate publication–100% of the profits will fund our CDR technology development.